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Modern Day Patericon, by Maya Kuzherskaya (2005)
2006 Ivan Bunin Prize
Kucherskaya's honest and humorous account of life within the modern Russian Orthodox community, including short biographies of numerous batyushkas (low ranking priests), sometimes fictitious, but presenting easily recognizable prototypes all the same, have made her popular beyond the bounds of church circles. Kucherskaya is a master at describing them. The images of priests and parishioners that she creates are sometimes far from sainthood. Among her characters, you can find “manager” priests, “superman” priests and even one “cannibal” priest. They teach their parishioners in a way that has a Zen Buddhist element to it. One calls his followers “an academy of idiots” for hanging on his every word. Another induces a parishioner, whose wife has been coming home late, to feign drunkenness to show her how distraught he is with her absence. Surprisingly, the wife takes a renewed interest in her “drinking” husband and begins to come home earlier. She never discovered that, on the priest’s advice, her husband had collected empty vodka bottles and cigarette butts from the street and then strewn them all over the apartment before she came home. “Father Konstantin never laughed as much in his whole life,” Kucherskaya writes at the end of the story.
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Kucherskaya’s book is also full of overzealous female parishioners, whom the author does not treat with much sympathy. “If only one of them had killed someone!” a batyushka says in one of her stories, after listening to a long line of empty confessions from women reporting that they had eaten sardines on a Friday, or some other trifle. “What conclusion can we draw from this story? The girl was insane,” is how she wraps up a story of a Literary Institute graduate who idolized her priest so much that she made him the censor of all her writings, before drowning herself in the Moscow River after becoming disillusioned with writing.
“This is one of my criticisms of church subculture,” Kucherskaya said. “Sometimes, people there confine themselves to a small space and write the word “vanity” on the window to the outside world. The young church girls often call this penance. It has nothing in common with real penance, however.”
When the book was first released by the secular Vremya publisher, readers’ reactions were enthusiastic. But, when the second edition was published by Biblio-Polis, whose books are sold in Orthodox churches, the tone of the reactions shifted with the audience. A church newspaper in St.Petersburg even suggested that Kucherskaya was under the spell of “hostile demons.” “Kucherskaya is an alien, who came to our circle accidentally or, more likely, with an evil purpose,” an article in the religious newspaper Pravoslavnyi St.Peterburg said. “Our joys appear stupid to her, while our troubles are a laughing matter for her. This is just unbearable!”
Fortunately, Kucherskaya wasn’t turned into an Orthodox Russian version of Salman Rushdie. Many monks, nuns and regular churchgoers rushed to her defense. “An honest reader will quickly remember many examples similar to those described in the book,” one of her defenders, who identified herself as a nun by the name of Yekaterina, wrote in a letter to the media. “For this reader, Kucherskaya’s book is just one more reason to think about the illnesses which still plague our church.” -
The Detector, a novel by Ksenia Buksha
Rights sold: Russia - AST
Longlisted for the 2018 National Bestseller literary award
Ksenia Buksha’s new novel The Detector is an anti-utopia dressed up as a classic closed-circle murder mystery, where biting sociopolitical satire on a police state alternates with profound poetic lyricism. The action takes place in Russia in the near future, where everyone in the land is preparing for the tsar’s coronation. The ceremony is to take place in an ancient monastery on the “Islands” (invented by the author, they are an evident allusion to the Solovetsky monastery beloved by Vladimir Putin). With thousands of people thronging to the locale, a walk-through security screener – the Detector – has been installed at the landing pier as one of the event’s many safety measures. Ten visitors set it off, for reasons none of them can fathom, and they are divested of their possessions and taken into custody inside the island fortress.
This is the mismatched band of strangers that ends up locked inside one of the Island Monastery’s cells, awaiting “clarification of their circumstances:” an oppositional journalist; a serial foster mother; a successful Central Asian businessman; a normalization-chip developer convinced that his implants, embedded in citizens’ brains, can maximize human productivity; a femme fatale/professional wedding organizer; an aging hippie who can predict the future; an earnest Frenchman who runs a Russian Down syndrome support group; a Jewish grandma who speaks Dog; a kind man who tries to get in to the ceremony on his dead brother’s ticket; and a woman who wants to have the tsar’s baby. They squabble over everything from which of them must be guilty of wanting to kill the tsar, to how to divide up their rations, to the childlessness tax and the ban on resuscitating anyone who is reproductively disabled or of retirement age. Here, in this closed space, they display both their own individual characters and the character of the country they live in, the character of today’s Russia.
The lives of all ten of these dissimilar individuals depend on whether they can solve a mystery: what shared trait made them each set off the Detector? And what is going to happen to them after the coronation?
Praise for Ksenia Buksha´s The Detector
As usual, Ksenia Buksha’s new novel isn’t anything at all like her previous ones. As usual, it is dazzlingly brilliant, fresh, and disturbing. And as usual, it’s full of black comedy, ruthlessness, and that special kind of elegance and grace found only in Petersburg prose. And the fact that these days, lots of people are having similar thoughts and feelings? Well, that’s what makes writers writers: while we haven’t even admitted it to ourselves yet, they’ve already said it out loud, and it left our ears ringing. -- Dmitry Bykov, literary critic
Buksha is talented and fizzing with ideas, with her own idiosyncratic metre and vernacular, which makes for an exciting read. The Frame / Ramka throws together ten characters (all determined by the metal-detector-like "frame" to be a danger to the mass spectacle they've all come to attend, and consequently temporarily incarcerated together) and uses them, with their individual narrative dialects to voice, interrogate, and kick around a host of ideas ranging from the surveillance state and imminent technocracy to human rights, consumerism, identity, the corruption of power, and the chaotic perils of modern life. She owes a debt to both Sorokin and Kafka, but writes with a manic energy all her own. Beyond the clever device of the frame as an impassive automated bureaucratic separator of the wheat from the chaff, there's no meaningful overarching plot, but there needn't be - like a spliced-and-diced video-game Canterbury Tales on acid, the otkazniks' individual stories crash into a kind of mosaic whose nuance may be hard to discern but whose overall impression is one of wild colour and eye-popping, nerve-shredding lights. Towards the end the sheer multiplicity of characters and vectors spins out of control and explodes, but perhaps to wish for a less messy ending is beside the point. With the stories flipping between monologue, stream-of-consciousness, dialogue and exchanges often resembling texting rather than conversation as they unfold, the whole text comes intriguingly close to a prose poem. The Frame is hyper-active, funny, idiosyncratic and exhausting - but certainly never bland. -- Ilona Chavasse, literary critic and translator
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